In the September 8, 1956, issue of National Review, we said, “For many years, the great bullies in America have been the big, tough, cocky labor unions; yet those who cry out against their excesses are yawned away, dismissed as cranks, pests.” Since then, more Americans have come to see things our way, leaving organized labor behind. But that doesn’t mean the unions have changed.
Today is Labor Day, a day when the rest of the media (much of it unionized) sanitize the history of organized labor, telling feel-good stories about how unions invented the weekend or made workplaces safe. Most advances of that sort are actually caused by higher productivity and are observable anywhere productivity improves, no matter what the union regime looks like. The media leave out the constant corruption and politicization that have persuaded so many Americans that union bosses are in it for themselves, not for the workers.
Not mentioned in labor hagiography is that arguably the largest domestic-terrorism campaign in U.S. history was waged by a union. From 1905 to 1911, the Ironworkers union bombed more than 100 industrial sites across the country, in a campaign that was centrally coordinated from the union’s headquarters. No one was killed until 1910, when 21 died in its bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, whose owner at the time was opposed to unions. Even after that, the bombing campaign continued, with the Springfield, Mass., municipal building going up in a 1911 blast.
In a media environment where old institutions are often expected to apologize for conduct others have committed a century or more earlier, the Teamsters are never held to account for decades of embezzlement, violence, and Mafia links that have occurred much more recently. It took 25 years of federal oversight for the Teamsters to reach the bare minimum standard of not being integrated with organized crime, a process that was only completed in 2015, and Teamsters officials have still been convicted of crimes since then.
For many unions, the corruption isn’t even in the past. The United Auto Workers today operates under the watch of a court-appointed monitor, who is currently investigating president Shawn Fain for financial misconduct and workplace retaliation. This summer, the IBEW Philadelphia local had its longtime president and business manager each sentenced to federal prison for bribery and embezzlement.
This isn’t a case of a few bad apples ruining the bunch. Corruption is systemic to American unionism, and it has been for over 100 years. For a long time, these bullies had disproportionate economic and political power, and that rubbed many Americans the wrong way.
They voted for Republicans who would do something about it. When Ronald Reagan fired the striking air-traffic controllers and decertified their union, he was castigated as a bully himself. But it is illegal for federal employees to go on strike, a crime punishable by up to a year in jail. By merely barring them from government employment and not prosecuting them, Reagan was being magnanimous. The message was nonetheless received: Reagan meant business, and unions weren’t in charge.
U.S. union membership has been declining for decades, no matter which party is in power. For all its efforts to engineer a union resurgence as the self-described most pro-union administration in American history, the Biden administration has overseen record lows in the union-membership rate. No amount of media hype can change the facts: Private-sector unionization is at 6 percent.
That’s a big drop from the 1950s peak of about one-third. Usually unremarked upon is that even then, when organized labor was supposedly delivering the goods for workers, two-thirds of Americans were not members. That was during a time when right-to-work laws were less widespread than they are today, so many in the unionized third didn’t have much of a choice in joining. Still today, private-sector workers in 24 states do not have the legal guarantee that joining or financially supporting a union is voluntary.
Though the U.S. has a low unionization rate among developed countries, the downward trend in union membership is a general phenomenon. The union-membership rate in the OECD has declined from 38 percent in 1960 to 16 percent today. That includes decades-long declines in countries that pro-union Americans sometimes want to emulate, such as Germany and the Netherlands.
Half of the union members who remain in the U.S. work for government, a fact that would astonish the man who led the actual most pro-union administration in American history, Franklin Roosevelt. He did everything he could to boost private-sector unions for the benefit of his Democratic Party, which reaped what it sowed in 1946 when Republicans won control of Congress and passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Harry Truman’s veto after union agitation roiled the post-war U.S. economy. But even Roosevelt knew that collective bargaining was not fit for the public sector, where unions since the 1960s playact negotiating with a government that can’t go out of business led by politicians they helped elect.
This perversion is on full display in Chicago, where a former teachers’-union organizer is mayor with the backing of the teachers’ union, but it exists in varying degrees in every government with unionized workers. The basic problem is a constitutional one, since Article IV guarantees to every state (and, as creatures of the states, every locality) a republican form of government. When public-sector unions are able to collectively bargain not only for wages and benefits but for work rules that dictate how the government is run, they are taking power that rightfully belongs to the voters and their elected representatives. A constitutional amendment to prohibit their existence would be right and just.
Unions wield their political power to pursue the full suite of progressive policy goals, from raising the minimum wage and taxes to supporting gender ideology and Palestinian activism. It’s no wonder that in a politically 50–50 country, most people don’t feel comfortable paying dues to a 99–1 labor movement.
The great bullies of 1956 America have been reduced to petty ones thanks to conservatives who have cried out against their excesses. Far from dismissing us as cranks, Americans have been dismissing union bosses for the corrupt political activists that they are. Rather than reflect on this and reform, union bosses seem content to stay the course and continue to snuggle up to Democrats. Let them deal with these goons. We’ll celebrate worker freedom today, and every day.